EPIC has filed an epic mandamus petition, asking the Supreme Court to vacate Judge Vinson’s FISC order regarding Verizon telephony metadata. One of the more interesting citations is to a conference held at Princeton in 1972 organized by a young lad named Samuel Alito:

The need for a statute and a court to oversee national security surveillance was anticipated several years before enactment of the FISA and the establishment of the FISC. See Report of the Chairman − Samuel Alito, Conference on the Boundaries of Privacy in American Society, Woodrow Wilson Sch. of Pub. & Int’l Affairs, Princeton Univ. at 5 (Jan. 4, 1972).

EPIC posts the reports of Alito, who was chairman here.

And, less impressive citations to Sotomayor and Breyer:

Awareness that the Government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms. And the Government’s unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal private aspects of identity is susceptible to abuse.” United States v. Jones, 132 S. Ct. 945, 956 (2012) (Sotomayor, J., concurring). As Justice Breyer has recently noted, “the Government has the capacity to conduct electronic surveillance of the kind at issue.” Clapper v. Amnesty Int’l, USA, 133 S.Ct. 1138, 1158- 59 (2013) (citing, inter alia, Priest & Arkin, A Hidden World, Growing Beyond Control, Wash. Post, July 19, 2010, at A1 (reporting that the NSA collects 1.7 billion e-mails, telephone calls and other types of communications daily)).